Independent Country has crafted a great hypothetical response for Roger Clemens to use when he appears before the congressional hearing(aka, inquisition, witch hunt, etc.) about steroid use.

Mr. Chairman, I have read the Constitution and it does not grant you authority to ask the question or hold this hearing on my alleged steroid use. Therefore, I will exercise my rights as an American citizen under the Tenth Amendment, and my natural rights as a human being, and refuse to answer it.

The Constitution you have sworn your allegiance to gives the Congress few and specific powers. Prohibiting individual drug use is not one of them. This is clearly left to the states and to “the people,” as the Tenth Amendment says.

Continue reading Plead the Tenth.

We can dream, can’t we?

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Leave it to Douglas Wilson, a much better writer than I am, to sum up the whole theme of this blog in just a few paragraphs.

Frederic Bastiat put it well — “Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.” Flip this around and we see that no society can or will have economic liberty unless there is a robust faith in God pervasive throughout that society. If there is no faith in God, we want to get in there and manage what everybody else is doing, and liberty dies. When we have faith, we let go. When we don’t believe, we clutch, preferably through our elected representatives.

And what’s truly sickening about it all is that it is the Christians who are so quick to kill liberty and clutch to their elected representatives. As Wilson shows, however, this is simply motivated by fear, and shows a supreme lack of faith.

You cannot have genuinely free markets without free men, and you cannot have free men without the gospel. If you do not have the gospel, then man will get in there somehow in order to try to save himself and others. He will try to save himself by using taxes, redistribution, lobbying influence, stimulus packages, environmental regulations, land reform, cozy deals with the government, and so on, ad infinitum.

In other words, he will try to save himself through violence and theft, which is nothing but base animal instinct.

We try to imagine life without our precious [government], and then we panic — and our panic chases us back into what we call prudence. We don’t know what liberty is, and so it scares us. We don’t know what liberty is because we don’t know what the gospel is, and we don’t know what the gospel is intended to do. Peter can’t walk on the water so long as he is holding on to the side of the boat.

It’s time to test the waters and let go of the boat.

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Alright, so this blog was only started in August, but I will participate in the tradition anyway.

Thank you to all of my readers. I hope you have been encouraged/informed, as I certainly have been from the experience so far. Please let me know your thoughts below on how best to improve this blog and increase readership. What do you read this blog for, and how can I deliver more of that?

August:

The launch. This blog started off posting almost every day.

The post that put me “on the map”, or at least began the process, was my collection of thoughts on Ron Paul, and why he had me confused. My thoughts have evolved somewhat since then, and I hope to revisit them later.

I also began my Government in Scripture series. I admit to being somewhat out of material at the moment (I guess I need to read my Bible more…), but it went strong for a while.

If you have any scripture that relates to government that you would like to see commented on, please let me know. You can either do a guest post here, or just let me write something about it.

September:

The first full month. I began the Government Tyranny roundups, which are simply depressing to do, but necessary, I think.

This is the month I blew up with 2 popular posts.

One was a response to the Evangelical Outpost’s uneducated remarks on Ron Paul. And thanks to a mention on LewRockwell.com by Casey Khan, it met with mild success.

The dark waters of satire were also ventured into. I put up my tips on how to read the bible correctly, kind of just for fun, and it turned out to be my most popular post up to that point, generating 28 comments. I will definitely be doing more satire, as it is a great way of framing truth.

My piece on Christians using the violence of the state to accomplish their goals, thus calling their morality into question, encapsulates, I believe, what this blog is all about, and the mindset I want to combat. It stirred up some controversy, mainly because I used the venerable Dr. James Dobson as the example I picked on.

October:

This was the month that Sailorcurt and I went back and forth on foreign policy.

The only other thing of note this month was this blogs nomination as the 2007 Blogging Rookie of the Year. New Liberty Creation got lost in the midst of a large number of quality startups.

November:

November saw my single most popular post about The Golden Compass. It generated 40 comments, from several different sides of the polygonal argument, and is still getting traffic, even after the movie came and puttered away irrelevantly.

With my piece on Plato, I also began what I hope becomes a long series of posts that challenge the fundamental assumptions of modern Christianity. Should Christians look more like pagans holding to Plato’s idea of the soul, or should they look more Biblical?

December:

The slowest month so far, and least number of posts. I confess to losing some of my motivation, because I wasn’t seeing any progress, and readership plateaued no matter what I did. I got tantalizingly close to breaking 50 RSS readers one day in November, but then it plummeted to the mid-thirties and has never gotten higher since.

I hope to start the New Year off strong, however. Again I ask, what can I do to improve?

Thanks again for reading.

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Of all the blog posts I read on Christmas, this one from Lew Rockwell is the one that truly moved me:

On this day in 1914, in the first year of the great civilizational disaster called WWI, German and British soldiers on the Western front stopped shooting. Not only that, they celebrated together, as brothers, the birth of the Prince of Peace. Their panicked leaders eventually forced them back to killing, but some day, the soldiers may not listen to the generals and the presidents, but to a Child born this day in Bethlehem. Then the angels’ song of “peace on earth” can begin to come true.

You can read more about the Christmas Truce here.

This is what I write for, and this is what I hope and pray for.

Christianity has everything to do with politics. When a group of men began proclaiming that a crucified, failed messiah was now Lord and Savior of the World, it was a direct challenge to principalities and powers at the time, especially Caesar. A true prince of peace, in contrast to the so-called Pax Romana that was drenched in the blood of common men and women.

So too is the gospel a direct challenge to the world’s rulers, including the evil men who perpetuated World War 1, sending men off to die for no purpose but to solidify their own power, thereby kicking off one of the bloodiest centuries this world has ever known. So much for the age of “enlightenment.”

I only hope that one day, we will stop listening to the politicians, as the soldiers did on the night of the Christmas Truce.

We will stop believing them when they insist we must kill this or that person.

We will stop believing them when they promise national glory.

We will stop believing them, and realize we have more in common with other people and nations than we were led to believe, like the soldiers discovered that time between the trenches.

Believing them only leads to death, for ourselves or others. History has shown no other outcome.

There is only one who deserves our trust, belief, and allegiance.

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(Forget Festivus for the Rest of Us. Guest writer Jacob Head gives a much better alternative for all of you humbugs out there.)

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Tired of too much Christ in your Christmas? Wish people would realize that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th (If we could only tell the whole world how ignorant they are!)? Think “Christian” religious holidays are sacrilegious and you would rather keep it all strictly pagan and/or secular?

Or perhaps you are not a Christian and spend your time contemplating the GREAT BLACK MORASS that is your unholy heart? Christmas just doesn’t work for you… and the void that is your godless soul prevents you from even thinking about Christ. What is a baby-killing, pot-smoking, feminist, pinko-lib to do? …Or a Super-Christian for that matter?

Fear not, O ye upright uber-Christians and yon emo-atheist, for a solution exists that is mutually beneficial to all of you! A holiday for baby-killers and wear-a-tie-on-wednesday-nighters alike!

“And how now brown cow?” I hear you beckon, “How doth such a holiday join the most HOLY and the most EVIL alike?

My answer?

“Elementary, thou doubting Thomas! For while one often yearns to approach the 7th circle of Hell and the other condemns all others but himself to its fiery torment, they both believe Christmas to be completely and utterly useless! Thus a new “holiday” is to be invented to join these two contrite hearts together in (un)holy matrimony! Give them all a reason for the season!

I thus give thee, oh wondering band of demonic anti-Christs and ye all wise Christians, “Cthulhumas!” The holiday for the rest of you!

Take that dichotomies! Hah, ha…

Hey, what better way to celebrate the birth of Jesus The Holidays then by chanting unpronounceable prayers to unspeakable, indescribable, soul-eating deities from another dimension?

Or, if your holiness prevents such blasphemies, simply have Mr. Cthulhu around the house as a useless, totally secular reminder for this secular day that so happens to fall on December 25th… for no apparent reason save it be secular!

It’s just like decorating a tree for no other purpose than to simply have a freaking tree in the house! In a way, that’s the true meaning of Christmas… completely devoid of the birth Christ of course, heh, heh.

Still not convinced? Consider, thou dense, amoral agnostic, your dislike of Christmas and all it’s Christ-birth-celebrating goodness. Now consider your love for fish nets, dark makeup and razor blades. How well Cthulhu meets your needs! Show those pesky celebrators-of-Christ-birthers what December 25th really means: the celebration of an ALIEN GOD! It’s like Scientology but believable!

Now consider, you upright and never-miss-a-class-even-if-dying-from-cancer-person; consider how heathens and weak brethren have taken the perfectly no-need-to-celebrate-day-that-is-not-really-Christ’s-birth and turned it into some sort of… of… celebration of CHRIST’S BIRTH!

Now consider your awesome knowledge that, in fact, Jesus’ birth probably didn’t even happen in the Winter and that the HOLY BIBLE doesn’t say to celebrate “Christmas.”

Now consider how you have trees, Christmas lights, gift cards and presents… but without meaning because you don’t want to be completely devoid of Holiday goodness like the JWs.

Consider how these completely secular-items-that-are-not-idols have NO MEANING! What better way then to give them meaning than Cthulhumas! Simply hang plush Cthulhu anywhere in the house as a simple reminder that the destroyer of civilizations simply does not exist!

Yes! Show those pagans who’s boss with your mockery of their GODLESS rites! Thus in ONE SWIFT STROKE you have turned pseudo-idols into ANTI-IDOLS! Oh, you are a positive cornucopia of BRILLIANCE!

Celebrating the savior? How about celebrating the destroyer of worlds?

Mistletoe and Holly? How about hellspawn and tentacles?

Jesus-trees and mangers? How about useless ornaments, christmas-carols-in-July-but-not-Decemberness, and RABID anti-Cthulhuism?

See?! The solution is obvious! Yes, Merry Cthulhumas to all, and to all a tentacally night!

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